Tag Archives: browser

Android Browser Using Extra Space? Check Gears!

Posted on February 9, 2010 by Kelson

I finally found out what’s been taking up so much space on the Android web browser on my G1: Gears!

Whenever the low-on-space warning* icon shows up on the phone, I open up the list of applications. Then I sort it by size, look for the largest apps that I don’t use anymore, and start uninstalling.

“Browser” is always high on the list, but it’s all data. While I could free up the space by telling it to clear everything, I want to hang onto things like bookmarks. Each time the icon popped up, I’d go back to the app, open up More and then Settings, and clear the cache, or the history, or cookies**, one category at a time.

Then I’d go back to the App list and it would still be using up several megabytes of space.

Yesterday, it occurred to me to check the Gears settings. Months ago, I’d set up two WordPress blogs with Turbo mode, which uses Gears as a permanent cache for the admin area. It’s great on a desktop or laptop with lots of local space and a slow or flaky Internet connection. But it wasn’t helping me much, because…

  • WordPress Turbo Mode is only really useful if you use the rich-text editor, which I don’t.
  • On the phone, I rarely manage either blog through the browser anyway. I usually use WordPress for Android (formerly wpToGo).
  • The files it stores take up a whole megabyte — per blog! (possibly more, depending on how the file system stores them.)

So I removed both sites from Gears, along with a couple of other sites that I’d added, but didn’t need anymore, and freed up about 3 MB.

It should be a while before I see that low-space icon again, and I shouldn’t have to ration my installed apps quite so closely!

*This wouldn’t be a problem if they’d given the G1 enough memory for apps in the first place, or if they’d let us install apps to the SD card (where I still have gigabytes of free space), or if I were willing to root my phone, or if I’d just bite the bullet and buy a Nexus One.

**I’d really like to be able to selectively delete cookies — or rather, to selectively keep a few cookies and delete the rest — but that’s another issue.

Posted in Troubleshooting | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

15 years of the Opera Web Browser

Posted on April 28, 2009 by Kelson

Origin of Opera: Comic StripHard to believe Opera has been around for 15 years. It’s only 14 since its first release, but 15 years ago two programmers started the project that became the Opera web browser.

I’ve been using Opera off and on for about 10 years. I think it was 1999 when a classmate showed me Opera 3.6, and how fast and small it was. (This was back when the installer fit on a floppy disk — and back when that actually made a difference.) I’ve followed it as they expanded from Windows onto Mac and Linux, onto high-end cell phones with Opera Mobile, and finally onto every Java-capable phone with Opera Mini. I’ve watched as they went from trialware to ad-supported to freeware business models. And while the desktop browser is no longer the speed demon it used to be, it’s been a consistent innovator in terms of both browser features and web capabilities.

So I’d just like to say: Happy 15th birthday, Opera! Just think, in a year, you’ll be old enough to drive!*

Happy 15th Brithday, Opera!

*In California, anyway. I think in Norway the driving age is 18.

Posted in Opera | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Upgrading the Web: IE8 Released

Posted on March 20, 2009 by Kelson

Internet Explorer.Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 yesterday, for Windows XP and Vista. So if you’re still running IE6 it’s once again time to think about upgrading. (Assuming, of course, that you’re not locked in by corporate policy or another piece of software.)

IE6 is now two versions behind the current release.

IE6 is almost 8 years old (it was released in 2001).

IE6 is lacking in many capabilities that all other modern web browsers have, in web technology, in security, and in features you can use.

You can read a review at Wired, a write-up from the IE team, or a summary of technical changes from WaSP.

Of course, Internet Explorer isn’t the only option out there. There’s Firefox, Opera, Chrome and a host of other alternative browsers that are worth checking out.

If you’re still running Windows 2000 or some other old version of Windows that can’t run IE7 or IE8, I’d absolutely recommend Firefox or Opera. Either will be much better than IE6, both will run on Windows 2000, and Opera will even run on Windows Me and Windows 98 (but you really ought to move to something more current than Windows Me.)

[Opera Logo] [Chrome Logo] [Firefox Logo]

Posted in Browsers | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

G1 Web Browser Compression

Posted on February 11, 2009 by Kelson

WTF? Android’s web browser doesn’t support compression? Shouldn’t it squeeze all the bandwidth it can, especially if you end up on an EDGE network? #

Hmm, it looks like the G1 just turns compression off when on cell networks for proxying. The network itself may do compression (in theory). #

Posted in Browsers | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The New Browser Switch Campaigns

Posted on October 20, 2008 by Kelson

Rather than looking at campaigns for specific browsers, I’m looking at a class of campaigns that are either promoting a group of browsers, or advocating against the current dominant player: Internet Explorer.

Browse Happy — the classic.

  • Goal: Move users away from Internet Explorer.
  • Target Audience: IE users.
  • Promotes: Firefox.  Also Safari, Opera, and… um… Mozilla.  Hmm, someone needs to update that.
  • Pitch: IE is dangerous.
  • Method: Banners

Alternative Browser Alliance

  • Goal: Keep multiple standards-compliant browsers viable.
  • Target Audience: All users
  • Promotes: Opera, Firefox, Safari.  Also Flock, SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, Camino,etc.
  • Pitch: Competition is good for everyone.  See what’s out there.
  • Method: Banners

End 6! (end6.org)

  • Goal: Move people off of IE6
  • Target Audience: IE6 users
  • Promotes: Firefox, Opera, Safari, Flock, IE7
  • Pitch: IE6 is outdated, buggy, and unsafe.  Use something modern instead.
  • Method: Overlay for IE6 visitors

Save the Developers (savethedevelopers.org)

  • Goal: Move people off of IE6
  • Target Audience: IE6 users
  • Promotes: IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera
  • Pitch: Coding for IE6 is a pain.  Stop putting us through that.
  • Method: Animated drop-down at top of page for IE6 visitors

(Yeah, I’m catching up on old draft posts.)

Posted in Browsers | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Suggestions Wanted: Alternative Browser Alliance Relaunch

Posted on September 24, 2008 by Kelson

You may have seen my website, the Alternative Browser Alliance. I put it together in 2005, when flame wars between Opera users and Firefox users were at their height, to show that we shared a common goal: opening the web. The most popular page on the site is a list of web browsers, which is linked as a resource from a number of sites and also gets a steady stream of traffic from people searching for alternative browsers.

Of course, things have changed a lot since 2005, so I’m planning an overhaul of the whole site. Continue reading →

Posted in Web | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

Improving Browser Reliability

Posted on July 31, 2008 by Kelson

The IEBlog recently posted about their efforts to improve reliability in Internet Explorer 8, particularly the idea of “loosely-coupled IE” (or LCIE). The short explanation is that each tab runs in its own process, so if a web page causes the browser to crash, only that tab crashes — not the whole thing. (It is a bit more complicated, but that’s the principle.) Combine that with session recovery (load with the same set of web pages, if possible with the form data you hadn’t quite finished typing in), and you massively reduce the pain of browser crashes.

I’d like to see something like this picked up by Firefox and Opera as well. They both have crash recovery already, but it still means restoring the entire session. If you have 20 tabs open, it’s great that you don’t have to hunt them down again. But it also means you have to wait for 20 pages to load simultaneously. It would be much nicer to only have to wait for one (or, if I read the IE8 article correctly, three).

Edited to add:

On a related note, I’ve run into an interesting conflict between crash recovery and WordPress’ auto-save feature. If you start a new post, WordPress will automatically save it as a draft. If the browser crashes, it will bring up the new-post page, but restore most of the form data you filled in. So the title, the text of your post, etc will all be there. But WordPress will see it as a new post, and you’ll end up with a duplicate.

This wasn’t a major problem when I encountered it — I had to reset the categories, tags, and post slug after I hit publish (since I hadn’t noticed that they’d been reset to defaults), and I just deleted the older, partial version of the post — but I can imagine if I’d uploaded an image gallery, I would have been rather annoyed, since there’s no way (that I’ve noticed) to move images from one post to another. Reuse them, sure, but not such that the gallery feature would work.

Posted in Browsers | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Summer of the Browser

Posted on June 5, 2008 by Kelson

Firefox: The new release candidate Firefox 3 RC2 is out. No date yet on the official launch, but they’re still saying June. Also, developers are starting to talk work that’s gone into what will become Firefox 3.1, such as completing CSS3 selectors support.

Opera: A new Opera 9.5 preview came out today, showcasing the browser’s new look. Also, the Opera Core team takes a look at what you can do if you put hardware acceleration on the whole browser.

Internet Explorer: IE8 beta 2 is scheduled for August. I’m looking forward to seeing what they’ve done, and figure I’ll start updating sites to accommodate changes. I held off changing too much when IE8b1 came out, because some of the differences were obviously bugs (triggering the Caio Hack, for instance; and yes, I reported it).

Flock has been moving ahead with small, rapid releases, adding integration for new services each time. They just added Digg and Pownce in Flock 1.2 a few days ago. Now they’re getting ready to start on Flock 2.0, which will merge in all the new capabilities of Firefox 3. That means it’ll get new rendering capabilities, better memory management, probably EV certs and such.

Posted in Browsers | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Watching Opera

Posted on May 27, 2008 by Kelson

My first post on Opera Watch is finally up: What Makes a Safe Browser?

It grew out of my rant on blocking IE6, which pulled in aspects of PayPal’s comments about blocking “unsafe” browsers. I had it mostly finished a month ago, but someone asked to review it before I posted it live, and he promptly got swamped by work on Opera Dragonfly. I finally got the go-ahead about 2 weeks ago, but I was caught up in packing, and then moving, and then unpacking.

Things are finally settling towards a semblance of normality, and with the recent change in how Opera treats EV certificates, I figured it was time to post the article before it became completely out of date.

Posted in Opera | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Flash Sighting? Opera: The Fastest Browser Alive!

Posted on April 25, 2008 by Kelson

Opera Software has just released a new beta version of the desktop web browser, Opera 9.50 beta 2. The splash page makes me think of something a bit different, though:

Opera 9.5 beta
Speed, security, and performance matter.

Now, we’ve made the fastest browser in the world even faster. Opera’s new beta is quicker to start, faster at loading Web pages and better at running your favorite Web applications.

Hmm, a red and yellow blur, zooming across the view? And an emphasis on speed? That reminds me a bit of this guy:

The Flash

Opera has long promoted itself on its speed, and it has used a super-hero theme in its advertising before. The vaguely Superman-like* “Opera Man” was used heavily in advertising Opera 8, despite being ridiculed by most of the browser’s user community.

So why not a subtle reference to the Flash?

*Blue costume + red cape. Hey, if a blue shirt and red jacket work for Clark on Smallville, you know the color scheme has become iconic.

Posted in Comics, Opera | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments